When K-12 schools closed their doors for in-person instruction in spring 2020, it had a variety of negative effects on students and teachers. It also shut off the training opportunities for future educators. 

In response, states instituted a variety of short-term waivers allowing candidates to teach without fulfilling their normal requirements. Those policies helped candidates who would have otherwise been prevented from teaching, while aiding school leaders in filling open positions.

Were teachers worse for this lack of training? 

New research from Massachusetts and New Jersey suggests maybe not. In both states, teachers who entered the profession without completing the full requirements performed no worse than their normally trained peers.

Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach. According to data compiled by a team of researchers at Boston University, roughly 5,800 individuals received one of these emergency licenses. 

Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. And, in fact, they had more such children in their classrooms. Even so, their students saw about the same rate of growth in math and reading as children taught by regularly licensed educators. Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors.

When the Boston University team asked principals and administrators why they hired emergency-certified teachers, they reported using them to fill shortage areas, especially in special education. 

The teachers working under these licenses also helped diversify the state’s classrooms, as they were about twice as likely as other beginning educators to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.

New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training. Still, researchers Ben Backes and Dan Goldhaber found similar outcomes as in Massachusetts: Teachers without the normal training and testing were at least as effective in reading and math as other novices. 

One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training. 

Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers. 

The better question now is why these temporary waivers aren’t being made permanent. The New Jersey policy expired after one year, and Massachusetts is trying to phase its version out this year. But with such promising results, policymakers might want to reconsider.  

The results are, in fact,  part of a pendulum swing in teacher preparation. A decade ago, states were trying to raise the bar. The supply of new educators had risen steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and there was a regular surplus of teacher candidates. There were regional and subject-area shortages, of course, but in general, school districts could be choosy about whom they hired. 

Given this backdrop, policymakers of all stripes came together to focus on quality over quantity. 

National leaders like then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten pushed for higher barriers to entering the profession. At the same time, the national accrediting bodies charged with overseeing teacher preparation programs pushed new standards of quality. And states adopted tougher licensing exams. 

Did these policies work? That’s a mixed bag at best. 

There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children. 

What’s undoubtedly true is that making it harder to become a teacher reduced the supply. Researchers found that the adoption of a new teacher licensure test called the edTPA reduced the supply by 14%, disproportionately hitting minority candidates in less selective or minority-concentrated universities. Another new working paper finds that in 21 states and D.C., shifting to the Praxis Core as their licensure test in 2013-14 led to a 12.5% decrease in teacher preparation completions.

In other words, making it harder to become a teacher will reduce the supply but offers no guarantee that those who meet the bar will actually be effective in the classroom. The recent COVID-related waivers should cause policymakers to re-evaluate whether barriers into the teaching profession actually serve a meaningful purpose, or if they’re keeping potentially talented educators out of the classroom.

These choices manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including how much money states provide for their public schools, how many people work in those schools and in what types of roles, and how teachers are recruited and trained. Here are five big differences:

1. Per-pupil spending

At the national level, public schools spent an average of $15,810 per pupil in 2019-20, not including debt or construction costs. But that figure hides tremendous variation across the country. Idaho and Utah schools, for instance, spent less than $10,000 per pupil, whereas Vermont; Washington, D.C., and New York schools spent upward of $25,000 per student.

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, school spending nationally is 6% higher than it was a decade ago, and it’s up 28% over the last two decades. The gap between states is also growing over time. Over the last 20 years, the 10 lowest-spending states have increased their school funding by 16%, while the top-spending states have boosted theirs by 48%.

These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and it is clearly cheaper to live in Boise than in New York City. But other decisions are driving these spending differences as well.

2. Student-to-teacher ratios

According to the most recent data, Vermont has the lowest student-to-teacher ratio in the country, at 10.5 students for every teacher. Maine, D.C., New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York were all under 12 to 1. The data are in terms of full-time equivalent employees, or FTEs, which account for the number of hours an employee actually works.

In contrast, states in the South and West tend to have far more students per teacher. Oregon, Idaho, Louisiana, Florida, Alaska and Washington are all clustered together at just under 18 to 1. Alabama comes next, at 19 to 1, followed by California, Arizona and Utah at over 22 students per teacher.

To put it another way, in per-student terms, Vermont public schools employ more than twice as many teachers as California, Arizona or Utah schools do.

3. Total staffing levels

Nationally, teachers make up just under half of all public school employees. But that ranges from 31% in Ohio up to 60% in Idaho. That is, Idaho’s investments in education are more likely to go to teachers, whereas Ohio’s are more likely to go to other types of staff.

As with teachers, Vermont has the lowest student-to-staff ratio, with just 4.5 students for every full-time equivalent staff member. Maine, Connecticut, D.C., Ohio and New Hampshire are all below 5.5 students per school employee. Some of these states are among the most expensive places to live, but their staffing choices also make their schools more expensive.

On the other end, some states operate with much leaner staffing models. For example, public schools in Alabama, Arizona, Idaho and Washington schools all have 10 to 12 students per staff member. In other words, the typical public school in some states employs about half the staff as is common in other states.

4. Teacher preparation programs

States also get their teachers through very different pathways. According to the 2020-21 National Teacher and Principal Survey, about 30% of educators in their first three years in the classroom came through an alternative certification program.

Midwestern and Northeastern states tend to rely less on alternative routes and more heavily on traditional training. Among states with reliable data, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Michigan, Connecticut and Kansas all have less than 20% of their new teachers coming through alternative programs.

On the higher end, more than half of all new teachers enter through nontraditional routes in Florida and Texas. New Mexico topped the list, with nearly two-thirds of all new teachers entering teaching in this way. These states may be making pragmatic decisions about local supply and demand, but relying more heavily on alternative programs also improves teacher diversity and likely lowers debt for teachers, while it may come at the cost of higher turnover.

5. Teacher credentials

Teachers are very well educated, and more than 60% have earned a master’s degree or higher by their third year in the profession (compared with only 14% of all American adults).

But those national trends mask wide variation across the states. Only 30% to 40% of teachers in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and South Dakota have earned a master’s, versus 87% in Massachusetts, 91% in Connecticut and 96% in New York.

In other words, the teaching profession looks very different depending on which state you happen to live in. What might appear weird to people in New York or Massachusetts may be standard practice for teachers, educators and schools in Florida or Arizona. As schools across the country work to re-engage students and get them back on track academically, it’s worth learning from these differences and understanding what can be ignored versus might be worth replicating.

Education Resource Strategies

Objectively speaking, it’s a weird time to be talking about layoffs in schools. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021 had the fewest layoffs in public education in the last two decades. Last year was just a bit higher, and so far 2023 is tracking about the same.

There are still pockets of layoffs due to unique local circumstances, but they are by no means widespread.

Still, widespread staff reductions seem very likely to happen in the very near future. Marguerite Roza at the Georgetown Edunomics Lab has called the expiration of federal relief funds in September 2024, combined with unprecedented enrollment declines, a “perfect storm” for school budgets.

As a result, it’s likely that school districts will have to trim their staff in the next two to three years. No one knows exactly when the storm will hit or how bad it will be, but I estimate it could easily result in 136,000 fewer teacher jobs.

Where will layoffs hit the hardest? This question is easy to answer at a high level: The districts most at risk will be those that have lost the most students and those that got the most ESSER money. Those tend to be large, urban, high-poverty districts.

Education Resource Strategies took a more sophisticated look at which states are most at risk, starting with how much the ESSER money represented compared with their typical education budget. Assuming that districts spent the federal money evenly over the entire grant period, this figure ranged from 4% to 5% in states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Colorado and Utah, and up to 12% to 17% in states like Alabama, New Mexico, Louisiana and, especially, Mississippi.

But state-level data are not sufficient to drill down to find districts most at risk. While some places received no ESSER funds at all, the highest-need districts saw influxes totaling up to 40% of their annual budgets.

So, to get a more precise estimate, I looked at staffing ratios and how they have changed over time. About three-quarters of school districts across the country have reduced their student-teacher ratios over the course of the pandemic. That is, they have more staff per student than they used to. For this analysis, I looked to see how many teachers a district would lose if they went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19.

Take Chicago as an example. According to the latest federal data, its student-teacher ratio shrunk from 16.5 students per teacher in 2018-19 to 14.5 in 2021-22. Over this three-year period, it added 5% more teaching staff even as student enrollment dropped 8%. For Chicago to go back to the same staffing ratio it had just a few years ago, it would need to shrink by 2,873 teachers.

All told, if every district in the country went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19, the nation would lose 136,000 teaching positions.

Districts wouldn’t have to lay off all those teachers; they could start by letting attrition and slower hiring rates reduce their employee headcount. If state budgets remain strong, that might allow many places to avoid, or at least limit, the number of layoffs.

But it’s also possible that my 136,000 estimate is on the low side. For one thing, districts tend to protect full-time classroom teachers from layoffs, especially higher-paid veterans. That means they would need to lay off many more junior teachers and other part-time employees to make up the difference. Given the makeup of the teacher workforce, that would have devastating effects on diversity efforts aimed at bringing more young Black and Hispanic educators into the workforce.

In one historical parallel, schools lost a similar number of teachers from 2009 to 2010 as the Great Recession began to hit school district budgets. When that happened, it wiped out a decade’s worth of staffing gains as schools shed a total of 364,000 jobs.

So, when might layoffs hit schools? At the moment, the economy looks quite strong. Inflation is falling, and the labor market is as strong as it’s ever been. But the last and biggest pot of federal relief money, $122 billion in ESSER III funds, expires at the end of September 2024, and Congress has given no signs that it will extend that deadline, let alone authorize additional funding to soften the decline.

So school districts mustn’t get complacent. Large urban districts with high concentrations of poverty will likely need to downsize. Districts that spent less of their COVID relief money on labor will be less at risk of needing to make big layoffs. Districts that are packing a higher share of their spending into this final year are especially vulnerable to hitting a big fiscal cliff.

There are a lot of uncertainties about the exact timing and magnitude of the impact, but districts will have to scale back their budgets in the coming years. By my estimates, that could mean as many as 136,000 fewer teachers.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

If I asked you to picture a new teacher, you might imagine someone just out of college who recently finished student-teaching and now, at age 22 or 23, is starting a full-time job in a district nearby.

That is one common path, but it’s far from the only one. In fact, teachers follow a wide variety of routes into the classroom. Understanding that complexity is important for state and district policymakers looking to solve their hiring challenges.

Let’s walk through some data, starting with the age of new teachers. According to the 2020-21 National Teacher and Principal Survey, 45% of first-year educators were under 25. These fit the stereotype, but 18% of beginning teachers were in their 30s, 11% in their 40s and 4% were just starting out in their 50s.

Teachers also come through a wide variety of training programs. According to the same national data, 30% of new teachers follow non-traditional paths. But these vary widely across the country, from 0 in some states to up to 56% in Florida and 59% in Texas.

Furthermore, the distinction between “traditional” and “alternative” teacher preparation is murky. In traditional programs, a candidate completes a program of study, including student-teaching experience, before becoming a full-time teacher, whereas alternative programs allow people to serve as teachers while they complete classes on nights and weekends. However, some colleges and universities run both types of programs. And, as a big Mathematica evaluation found, a traditional program in one state might require the same number of credit hours as an alternative program in another state.

Some examples might help drive home the point. When people imagine a traditional teacher preparation program, they might think of former “normal” schools — public universities like Illinois State. As of the latest data, it ranked No. 7 nationally in terms of the number of graduates from teacher preparation programs. But right above Illinois State was the “alternative” nonprofit Relay School of Education’s New York program, and right below that was a “traditional” program at the for-profit University of Phoenix.

The two biggest preparation programs in the country were A+ Texas Teachers, a for-profit “alternative” program the state is now trying to shut down, and Grand Canyon University, a “traditional” for-profit, mostly online program.

A vision of the stereotypical teacher pathway may also distort perceptions of the labor market and potential solutions when shortages pop up. Historically, as a country, we’ve produced more teachers than there were available jobs. If they’re dedicated to education, those would-be teachers might work as substitutes or teaching assistants as they seek full-time positions.

Another source of new teachers comes from reentrants — people who once taught, left and look to return to the classroom. Depending on the year, about one-sixth to one-third of teachers hired nationally are reentrants.

Consider the case of Texas. The state is atypical in a lot of ways, but the Texas Education Agency has an excellent dashboard comparing new teacher certifications versus new hires and detailing the paths those new educators took.

I created the pie graph below to help visualize the data that shows where Texas districts are finding their new teachers. The traditional pathway, where someone completes a teaching degree at a college or university and then immediately becomes a teacher, was actually the fourth most common source path for new hires in Texas last year. Slightly more came through through alternative certification programs, which the state calls interns.

Another large category were teachers hired without any state certification at all. In recent years, Texas has granted an increasing number of schools and districts the flexibility to fill an increasing number of teaching roles without going through any Texas state certification process.

But the biggest group of new teacher hires was people who had previously taught in Texas schools and are returning to the classroom. Almost one-third of all new hires came from these reentrants.

Source: 2022-23 data from the Texas Education Agency, https://tea4avcastro.tea.state.tx.us/oess/edrs/regional-dashboards

These trends vary across the state. Large urban areas and rural areas hired a lot of interns — alternatively certified teachers — but the cities especially found a lot of re-entrants. Charter school networks like Uplift, IDEA Public Schools and KIPP found most of their hires outside of state certification requirements.

What about teacher quality?

It’s true that educators who come through emergency licensure programs tend to be less effective overall than those who are fully certified. But it’s also true that earning a certification is no guarantee that a teacher will be effective in the classroom. For example, the Mathematica study cited above, and others, have found that teachers who go through traditional preparation programs perform no better than those who come through alternative routes.

In one recent example, recent research out of New Jersey found that pandemic-era exceptions that allowed people to become teachers outside the state’s normal certification requirements attracted more racially diverse candidates who were no less effective than those who followed the traditional path. And in the supposedly “Wild West” of Texas, researchers could find essentially no meaningful differences among the different preparation programs in terms of boosting student outcomes.

In other words, these are policy choices that carry trade-offs.

The teacher labor market is constantly in flux. Right now, it’s tighter than ever before, but it has not and never will be in perfect balance. Teacher preparation completion numbers are still well below where they were 10 to 15 years ago, though they show signs of rebounding. The challenge for states and districts is to work within those constraints to find and entice the best people to work in their schools.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I was one of those parents. Sure, my wife and I read to our son every night, and we had plenty of books, newspapers and magazines around the house.

Our local public school spent a lot of time on literacy too, but I cringe now as I look back on how they did it. They taught kids to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words using pictures, the first letter or other context clues.

I now know these are called three-cueing strategies, and they are hallmarks of bad reading instruction.

Still, it was only during home school in the wake of the COVID-19 shutdowns that we noticed that our son couldn’t sound out words. He had never been taught. Like millions of kids, he lacked the secret reading “code” that lets beginners understand how letters correspond with sounds and how those sounds blend into words.

We were able to get our son back on track using old-school phonics workbooks, asking him to read to us at night, and giving him practice with reading comprehension tasks.

After working with our son and reading everything I could get my hands on to learn about the science of reading, I came up with an idea for a program to help other parents catch problems early and support their children’s early reading habits.

I called it Read Not Guess. I started with a summer pilot program last year. Parents received simple phonics lessons by email showing them how to work with their children on sounding out letters, blending sounds into words and building words into sentences. The program had over 1,100 subscribers, and I got enough positive feedback to convince me it was worth continuing.

So this year, parents and other caregivers who sign up will be able to select the program that best fits their needs. I’m offering three levels: a beginner program (covering the basic letter sounds), an interim program that goes beyond the basics (e.g. digraph sounds like th, sh and ch) and a third level that addresses common vowel combinations that are confusing for young readers (such as ea and oi).

All three levels are free and open to all. They’re structured as summer challenges and will run for five weeks starting Monday, July 17. The lessons are short and meant to take only 5 to 10 minutes. Participants who finish the challenge will earn a (digital) certificate of completion.

For parents who want to do more, the free Teach Your Monster online games are a great place to start. Our family has enjoyed the Stories Podcast on long road trips; it’s fun and helps kids build their vocabulary. For younger kids (ages 3 to 5), the free Play Roly activities help kids build their skills in recognizing, hearing and speaking letter sounds. For older kids (entering first through eighth grade) who need more practice with reading comprehension, ReadWorks has free summer printable packets.

Many states and school districts across the country — including ours! — are reconsidering the way they teach kids to read. They’re adopting new curriculum, training teachers, and investing in screening tools and tutors. Speaking as an education policy researcher, it’s great to see the spread of these best practices.

But as a parent who’s been burned already, I’m reserving a healthy dose of skepticism. I’d encourage other parents to do the same.

For anyone who needs more convincing, I strongly recommend listening to Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story” podcast. It’s a striking example of how policy can get watered down over time and research ignored.

Rather than passively waiting on the sidelines, ask your child’s school if they’re teaching kids how to sound out words. You can sign up for Read Not Guess to give your kids a head start on the next year, or find decodable books — which focus on specific phonics sounds or spelling — to help them practice. Then, check your child’s progress using the short “Readiness Check” from Learning Heroes or, for a more detailed assessment, give them a full grade-level phonemic awareness check-up.

Reading is freedom. It opens up the world. But parents have to make sure their kids are given the keys to the reading code.

As I forecast in September, the new data show that schools have been adding teachers even as they serve fewer students. 

The first graph below tells the national story. Student enrollments (in red) fell in the first full year of the pandemic and have not recovered. In total, student enrollments in public schools are down 2.6% (1.2 million) from the 2018-19 academic year. Meanwhile, those same schools employed 32,000 more teachers (a gain of 1.1%, in green). 

There was a very small dip in the number of teachers from 2019-20 to 2020-21 (a decline of .03% nationwide), but that has since reversed, and the U.S. is now safely above pre-pandemic levels. 

There’s wide variation across the country, but public schools in many states have been adding teachers while serving fewer students. The next graph compares the change in student enrollment versus the change in the number of teachers by state from the 2018-19 to the 2021-22 school years. Complete data were available for 47 states and Washington, D.C.; of those, 40 had a lower pupil/teacher ratio last year than they did in the last year before the pandemic. Data for all years isn’t available yet for three states — Illinois, Nevada and Utah — but they also appear to be lowering their student/teacher ratios. 

The new NCES figures are from last school year, but they help answer some questions that other federal datasets can’t address. For example, according to the latest payroll figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in public K-12 schools is still down somewhat from February 2020. 

The bureau’s data are the timeliest available, but they can be somewhat misleading in that they count each individual employee regardless of how many hours they work or in what role they serve. So a school with 50 full-time and 20 half-time employees would count as having a total of 70.

The NCES data more accurately reflect a school’s total available staff time, because they are calculated in terms of full-time equivalent employees (FTEs), which takes into account the number of hours an employee works. Two half-time employees equal one full-time worker, so in the example above, NCES would count that school as having 60 FTEs (50 full-time + 20 half-time employees). According to the NCES data, public schools nationwide employed 65,000 fewer FTEs last year, or about 1% less than their pre-pandemic total.

But the NCES data also allow researchers to unpack employment changes by role. In addition to more teachers, schools now employ more student support staff, a category that includes attendance officers and providers of health, speech pathology, audiology or social services. The number of school administrative support staff, guidance counselors, district administrators and school psychologists are also all above pre-pandemic levels. 

So which types of employees did schools lose? In numeric terms, the categories with the biggest declines are paraprofessionals (down 34,000 FTEs) and a group of workers NCES classifies as “all other support staff.” This is the second-biggest category of workers in schools, after teachers, and it includes plant and equipment maintenance, bus drivers, security and food service workers. Schools had 41,000 fewer FTEs in this “other” category of workers, thanks in part to a massive hiring slowdown in spring and summer 2020 and continued school closures well into the following academic year.

These gaps can force the remaining employees to take on additional responsibilities. That may be a big reason why teachers are reporting higher workloads and anxiety, and why they’ve been asked to fill in on other non-teaching tasks.

However, to help schools to improve their services and be responsive to student needs, it’s important to be precise about the exact staffing challenges schools are facing. Contrary to warnings of a mass teacher exodus or a nationwide teacher shortage, policymakers should remain focused on local context, specific shortages and potential solutions to address schools’ actual needs.

Chad Aldeman is policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

It’s a weird time to be having a national conversation about teacher shortages. Thanks in part to the surge of federal relief funds, schools have ambitious hiring plans — but they have been unable to bring on as many people as they would like. As of last month, job openings remain elevated well above normal levels.

And yet, on a per-student basis, schools today employ more teachers and other staff than they’ve ever had.

This may sound surprising or counterintuitive, so let’s use data on my home state of Virginia as an example. In 2018-19, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Virginia public schools employed just under 87,000 teachers. In 2020-21, those same schools employed about 75 more, a gain of 0.1%.

That may not sound like much, but Virginia’s public school enrollment declined by 2.9% over the same time period. By dividing the number of students by the number of teachers, it becomes clear that Virginia districts were able to shrink their student-teacher ratio from 14.8 to 14.4.

These trends continued last year: Virginia schools added more teachers even as student enrollment continued to decline.

Virginia is typical of the rest of the country. Full data isn’t yet available for two states, Illinois and Utah, but of the remaining 48 states and the District of Columbia, almost three-quarters (36) added teachers in the first full year of the pandemic. Only two states, North and South Dakota, and D.C. served more students. As a result, schools in 46 out of 49 states effectively lowered their teacher-student ratios during the height of the pandemic.

Data isn’t complete for the 2021-22 school year, but I looked at 10 large states and found that all of them increased their teacher counts last year, even as student enrollment continued to lag behind pre-pandemic levels.

These are statewide figures, and some schools and districts are surely exceptions. These are also large-scale numbers, and it’s possible there are too few teachers in certain areas (like special education or STEM subjects) and too many in others. That mismatch may be especially acute in schools experiencing the most dramatic enrollment losses.

The same trends appear when broadening the approach to count all school district staff, not just teachers. Nationally, districts had slightly fewer employees in the 2020-21 school year, but student enrollment fell faster. That is, the number of school staff per student served continued to rise.

This continues the long-term trend. When the first Baby Boomers started attending public schools in the 1950s, a typical American school district employed about 58 workers for every 1,000 students enrolled. By the time Millennials like myself attended school in the 1990s, schools employed twice as many adults to serve the same number of students.

In the 2020-21 school year, staffing levels hit all-time highs, and the typical public school district employed 135 people for every 1,000 students it served.

Given the current rush to hire, I would not be surprised to see these numbers go even higher in the years to come.

These findings may raise some eyebrows. After all, as of the latest national figures, local public schools employ about 4% fewer people than they did in February 2020. But those statistics are misleading, because they include part-time staff. But those statistics are misleading because they count all employees including part-time staff. Other survey data suggest that nearly all the job losses in education came from part-time workers. The figures in the chart above use a different calculation known as full-time equivalents. Head count numbers might be germane in certain instances, but the number of equivalents better represents total staff time available.

My Edunomics Lab colleague Marguerite Roza has called adding staff the main “big bet” public education has pursued over the last 50 years. When school spending has risen, districts haven’t added more instructional time for students or raised teacher salaries. Instead, they’ve always increased staff.

Schools today employ many more teachers per student than they did in prior eras, across all subjects and grade levels, including art, music and foreign languages. But over the last decade, most of the staffing increases have come from non-teaching roles. Schools employ more counselors and specialists, like reading coaches; more instructional aides, to work with English learners and students with disabilities; and more vice principals and administrators, to oversee new regulatory and managerial tasks.

The investments in staffing increases have also come at the expense of investing in dedicated tutoring for students who are behind, or new ways to use and assign staff within schools. Those strategies might have helped with disruptions like COVID-19, but schools haven’t pursued those ideas at scale either.

Now that districts are flush with cash thanks to the infusion of federal dollars, they’re once again making a big bet on staffing. Unfortunately, old habits die hard.

Reading is freedom. It opens up the world. 

In my day job as an education researcher, I know that too many kids never learn to read well. Kids who don’t learn to read fluently by 3^rd grade will struggle as the material gets more complex. 

That fact hit home this spring when I noticed my 8-year-old son had picked up a bad reading habit at school. When he came to a word he didn’t recognize, he would guess. 

Rather than sounding out the word and breaking it down into parts, he looks at the first letter or considers other context clues and then tries to guess. Sometimes he looks to me for confirmation and takes his eyes off the page. If I step in to tell him he got it wrong he’ll just try again, without even looking back down. 

As a parent, this process drives me crazy. You can’t read without looking at the words! I also know this guessing strategy is not going to serve him well as he encounters more challenging texts. 

My wife and I are working with my son to slow down, sound out unfamiliar words and use his finger to track his reading. He’s getting better. 

But these problems are not unique to my kid or his neighborhood school in suburban Virginia. Many schools across the country continue to rely on literacy programs that encourage these practices. Meanwhile, reading scores were declining even before COVID-19 hit, and school closures only made things worse. 

All this led me to start a new initiative to help parents establish positive reading habits from the beginning—before bad habits have time to take root. I’m calling it Read Not Guess. 

Read Not Guess will start with a 30-day challenge to help parents get their kids ready to start the next school year strong. It’s free and open to all, and parents who sign up will receive a daily email with a short lesson. The lessons, which run from July 18 to Aug. 19, are meant for busy families and should take only five to 10 minutes to work through. 

I designed the Read Not Guess summer learning challenge to serve parents who want to help their kids but don’t know how or who just need some extra guidance. It will combine the best of a good phonics instruction book plus friendly nudges and regular encouragement, delivered in bite-sized lessons over email. 

By the end of the challenge, children will understand that English is read left to right, be able to identify and sound out the most common phonemes (letter sounds), begin blending those sounds into words, and start reading complete sentences. Parents will gain a deeper understanding of phonics; practice talking to their child about reading; and learn tools, games and assessments to monitor their child’s reading progress going forward.

Why should parents do all this work? Can’t they just rely on the schools to teach their kids to read? It’s been hard to be a parent through the pandemic, and it might be tempting for parents to take it easy this summer. 

But with many schools still in various stages of upgrading their reading curriculum, some classrooms may still be teaching legacy programs that encourage guessing, even though the evidence suggests good readers can sound out difficult words. Parents do not need to shoulder the full burden, but they can play an active role in building good habits and monitoring their child’s progress. Even relatively light-touch parent interventions can lead to big literacy gains for children, especially the most disadvantaged. Skills-based parental supports — like what Read Not Guess will offer — have even more promising results. 

Summer is a time for barbecues and swimming pools. But while school is out and the kids are at home, summer also presents an opportunity for parents to step in and help their children learn to read — not guess. It’s too important to leave to chance.

Edunomicslabs.org

A year ago, school districts wrote plans for how they were going to use their share of the $122 billion in American Rescue Plan money.

Fast forward to today, and information is starting to emerge about how schools are actually spending their windfalls. Martha’s Vineyard Public Schools in Massachusetts has already spent all of its nearly $400,000 allotment. Meanwhile, in Detroit, the school district hasn’t used any of the hundreds of millions sent its way.

Because Congress directed the money to flow through states, districts file for reimbursement as the funds go out the door. Our team at Edunomics Lab is compiling this data — reflecting actual spending, district by district — and has posted the early results in this ESSER Expenditure Dashboard.

Wondering how much remains to be spent in your district? The dashboard allows users to type in a district to see how fast (or how slowly) the money is being used. Or they can download an entire state’s file and run some analytics to see what the trends look like.

In some states, the dashboard includes additional detail on what those dollars paid for. In Olympia, Washington, the biggest investment so far is for mental health. In Gulfport, Mississippi, it’s facilities. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the largest investment is in student support. In Lewiston, Maine, much of the money is going to a sizable investment in staff training.

Overall, it is clear that districts are making very different choices with their money, and the pace of spending appears to be slow. In California, for instance, 41% of districts hadn’t been reimbursed for even a dime of relief plan spending through the middle of the school year. That includes big districts like Los Angeles Unified, Fresno and Long Beach, California.

For states where the dataset includes details on what was purchased, salaries and benefits are the largest category of spending. In places like Alaska and Oregon, over half of the money is going to labor costs. In Mississippi, 11 districts, including larger ones like Choctaw and Desoto counties, have devoted all of their rescue plan spending so far in those areas.

Other districts have put their early priorities elsewhere. In South Dakota, the Centerville district had already spent two-thirds of its funds on equipment. In Rhode Island, the Coventry district has been reimbursed $571,104 for property and equipment. And in California, San Francisco has categorized nearly all of its rescue plan spending so far under the broad umbrella category of “other maintenance.”

In some states, it is possible to zero in on the portion of funds intended to address the academic impact of lost instructional time. Congress required districts to set aside at least 20% of the money for that purpose, but most districts have a long way to go to reach the federal minimum.

In Wasington state, for example, while nine districts have already met the federally required minimum, about half of districts have not yet spent any rescue plan money earmarked toward learning loss. That includes larger districts like Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia. In other states breaking out this data so far, 80% to 90% of their student learning loss money remains unspent.

In California, 99% of that funding remains. Of the amount that has been spent, only 27% has gone toward summer or afterschool programs, or an extended school day or year. To date, the biggest category — capturing 73% of the total — is “other interventions.”

In order to unlock all their money, districts had to submit a draft plan indicating their spending priorities. Too often, however, those early drafts were little more than placeholders, as conditions and finances were changing quickly. Some districts pivoted toward hiring or retention bonuses when a tight labor market left some positions unfilled. The rapid rise in inflation meant the actual costs of construction or maintenance were far higher than originally planned. In other districts, declining enrollments prompted leaders to direct funds to offset budget gaps. It’s no surprise, then, that in many districts, actual spending is not matching the original plans.

The bottom line from the database is that in many places, there is still a lot of federal relief money left, and with that comes a responsibility to ensure it helps kids. For parent advocates, there is still time to ask to see how the money is being spent and how it’s affecting their children. Now is a great time for school communities to come together and examine the progress their kids have made (if they have) and whether it makes sense to alter spending plans going forward.

We hope district leaders, advocates, reporters and others will dig through the numbers to see how spending looks in their communities. Is the district on track to use its money by the September 2024 deadline, or does it need to speed up or slow down? How does spending so far compare to the original plan? Were most of the funds are spent on labor? Does the district have a plan for what to do when the federal money runs out? And most importantly, are the funds being targeted to the students and schools who need them the most?

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Edunomics Lab and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

Chad Aldeman is policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Katherine Silberstein is a research fellow at the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Aashish Dhammani  is a research fellow at the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

Consider the case of San Diego Unified (SDU). Student enrollment has been declining for years, and it suffered a particularly large drop in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In December, the district warned of long-term budget deficits and, as one cost-cutting measure, spent millions on early retirement buyouts for highly-paid veteran employees.

One contributing factor to SDU’s budget crunch was its history of awarding out-sized raises to teachers. Next year, for example, a ten-year veteran in the district will earn $33,000 more than when she started out. That’s an 85% increase over ten years, in a period when inflation rose only 17%.

Temporary Funds, New Permanent Commitments

The latest infusion of state and federal relief dollars have bought the district a temporary reprieve. But rather than using the opportunity to re-evaluate its past decisions, the district is making big new commitments that could bring more financial troubles down the road. Last month it announced plans to hire more full-time workers and again boost teacher salaries.

The pay increase makes for a particularly abrupt swing once you consider how it will affect individual workers. News reports have framed it as a “4 percent raise for educators,” but that doesn’t do it justice. Most SDU teachers will actually get 7-8% raises next year.

Take a beginning teacher who was new to the district last fall. She earned the minimum annual salary of $48,792. If she returns next year, she’ll get the 4% raise and also advance a “step” along the new schedule and be paid as a second-year teacher earning $52,648. That’s a raise of $4,007, or an increase of 7.9%. Similarly, a 10-year veteran with a Master’s degree will get a raise of $5,557 by collecting both the 4% raise and the step increment, an increase of 7.8% year-over-year.

There’s more. Teachers can boost their pay even further if they enhance their academic credentials. While researchers have found no difference in effectiveness between teachers with only a bachelor’s versus those with a Master’s degree, in San Diego, a teacher with only a bachelor’s degree tops out at $80,000, whereas a teacher with more college credits can earn up to $105,000.

In addition to the pay increases, SDU is also making an abrupt turn on staffing. Back in December, when the district was looking to cut its higher-paid veterans, it paid 370 employees up to $15,000 to leave mid-year. Six months later, the district’s latest agreement with the union calls for hiring more of the same types of employees—teachers, nurses, and counselors—that were paid to walk away just a few months ago.

Of course, SDU is by no means unique in facing pressure to boost salaries and hire more full-time staff. But using temporary funds to hire more workers and raise base salaries across the board will ultimately worsen the district’s long-term financial problems.

Non-Traditional Compensation Strategies to Solve DistrictChallenges

There are other ways to both raise pay and build capacity that don’t set up districts for financial stress down the road.

In contrast to SDU, some California districts are offering one-time, flat-dollar bonuses that don’t affect base pay. Those are more in line with the temporary nature of the federal infusion, and they don’t disproportionately drive money on the basis of seniority.

Some districts are going even further by using their state and federal windfalls to more directly address specific recruitment and retention challenges. Dallas ISD is offering a $4,000 signing bonus to bilingual teachers, and Detroit Public Schools is offering $15,000 bonuses to special education teachers. To combat higher turnover among junior teachers, Jackson Public Schools in Michigan is offering an incentive package worth $10,000 to cover moving expenses plus retention bonuses after one, two, and three years in the district.

Some are tying pay to other district priorities. Guilford County Schools in North Carolina is offering $20,000 to recruit highly effective teachers who agree to teach in the district’s highest-needs schools for three years. And Austin ISD made a 2% bonus contingent on whether the district meets its student enrollment target or not.

Next to these initiatives, San Diego Unified’s recent agreement looks like a lost opportunity. Rather than using its windfall to tackle persistent challenges, it has added to its long-term financial commitments.And when the federal money runs out, will it have the operating funds to pay for all the new employees it’s planning to hire?

That will depend on what comes next. But by adding more full-time employees and giving existing staff large base raises tied only to seniority and master’s degrees, SDU increased its chances of another abrupt budget reversal in the years to come.

(Getty Images)

Compared to a normal year, students learned less in 2020, were more likely to fail their classes and were less likely to be in school at all. Is this all just temporary? As we move further into 2021, will everything start returning back to normal?

Based on the research on past educational disruptions, the answers are sobering: We should expect large learning losses that will affect the current generation of students for the rest of their lives. Here are 10 key lessons from that body of research:

1. Lost learning time will translate into lost learning.

Years and sometimes even decades after a disruption in schooling, researchers are able to detect noticeable differences in student outcomes. That’s part of why states have mandatory attendance laws in the first place, why they require schools to make up for snow days and why they are concerned about students who are chronically absent. The more school students miss, the less likely they are to graduate from high school and college, earn a good job and remain gainfully employed as adults.

2. The losses are likely to be large.

Academics like to study the effects of random acts of God like earthquakes or floods. Because the events are random and cause measurable disruptions, researchers can be confident that differences in student outcomes can be traced back to the event itself. These studies find large, long-term effects on students in the form of lower graduation rates, worse economic outcomes and a higher likelihood of relying on government assistance. Although they will vary widely, the COVID-19 losses are likely to be at least as large as those stemming from other catastrophes. Millions of students haven’t had access to in-person learning since March, and they’re likely getting fewer hours of instruction than they normally would. With COVID case counts continuing to rise, virtual schooling is on pace to extend well into 2021.

3. The full extent of the COVID learning losses may not show up immediately, but small losses can grow over time.

Early in the pandemic, we had to rely on estimates and predictions for the size of the COVID19 learning losses. We’re starting to get some real data, from NWEA and Renaissance Learning, and the losses are not quite as large as we might have expected. But we shouldn’t celebrate quite yet. For starters, so far we’ve seen data only on samples of students who were tested in the same schools pre- and post- COVID shutdowns. We have not yet seen results that fully include marginalized groups like low-income students, English learners or children with disabilities. We may start getting more complete data if states are able to conduct testing this spring, but even those results may undersell the challenges. For example, after an earthquake hit Pakistan in 2005, students showed immediate academic losses, but even after they got back to school, the scale of those losses grew over time. If we don’t identify and remediate any losses immediately, we could do long-lasting harm by promoting students before they’ve mastered grade-level material.

4. Learning losses are likely to be larger in younger children.

Throughout the research literature on disasters, evidence suggests younger students suffer the largest, more noticeable effects. Older students sometimes show no effect at all. There are two main reasons for that. One is that younger students gain so much more from every year of school, and thus they have much more to lose (see Table 3 in this MDRC study). Second, younger students are less able to learn by themselves or through virtual environments. While educational disruptions can certainly derail the progress of older students, those are likely to be more about engagement and less about academics.

5. Math scores are likely to drop the most.

Unlike English language arts, where proficiency is more closely linked to a student’s home environment, math skills are generally picked up at school. That’s partly why educational interventions are much more likely to produce changes in math scores than they are for reading. As predicted, both the NWEA and Renaissance Learning results suggest the COVID-19 shutdowns and shift to virtual learning seem to have reduced math scores more than English results.

6. Beyond academic losses, students are at risk of disconnecting from education.

A study from the National Student Clearinghouse found that immediate college-going rates fell 29 percent for low-income high school students last year. And those are the kids we can count. According to estimates from Hailly Korman, Bonnie O’Keefe and Matt Repka, between 1 million and 3 million students have not received any formal schooling since the shutdowns began in March. Although older students may not be losing academic skills as much as their younger siblings, if students disconnected from schools and never re-engage, they’re unlikely to finish high school, let alone advance to some form of postsecondary education. This has happened to us before. In 1916, schools in many places closed for several weeks in the midst of a polio outbreak. When researchers looked at what happened to students affected by the closures, they found that younger children eventually returned to school while those of working age dropped out and eventually completed fewer years of education. A century later, we’re at risk of repeating this scenario.

We should be cautious about interpreting any results without a full and complete sample. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some students flourish in a remote environment, and research on past educational disruptions has often found that students from upper-income families do not suffer any negative effects at all. For example, when Argentina went through a wave of teacher strikes that caused the average child to miss 88 days of instruction, students from the richest 25 percent of families experienced no noticeable effects. This leads to …

8. Low-income and disadvantaged students will suffer the biggest losses.

This may be obvious by now, but we were not all in this together. In the wake of the Argentina teacher strikes, students from families in the bottom 75 percent of income had noticeable losses, with the poorest students suffering the largest academic and economic declines. The same was true in Thailand after a 2005 earthquake: Children of well-educated mothers showed no effects, while kids from low-income families suffered learning losses that translated into a lifetime earnings loss of 15 percent. Lest you think COVID-19 learning losses are someone else’s problem, consider that the Argentina teacher strikes eventually reduced that country’s economy by more than $700 million a year.

9. The COVID-induced recession will affect children, families and schools in many ways.

In addition to academic losses and disrupted pathways, the COVID-induced recession is likely to lead to a baby bust in the years to come, which will mean tighter budgets for schools and encourage more school district competition for the remaining students. Young children and babies who live in counties hit hardest by a recession face lower odds of graduating from college, are likely to earn less money and are more likely to live in poverty as adults. The harmful effects of the COVID-19 disruptions may even pass down across generations. The study of the teacher strikes in Argentina found that the children of strike-affected students were more likely than their peers to be held back in school.

10. Without any action, the losses are likely to have long-term consequences.

It might be easier to focus on shorter-term wins like getting kids back into some semblance of normal school. But the evidence suggests that won’t be enough. Without a plan for recovery focused on students’ needs, we’ll be condemning a generation of children to worse academic and economic outcomes throughout their life. Looking back in time, the children born during the 1918 flu pandemic had lower educational attainment, increased rates of physical disability, lower income and a greater reliance on government welfare.

With hindsight, we have an opportunity to learn from the evidence of past disasters and take action now to make sure the same results don’t happen again.

Chad Aldeman is policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

Two Young Girls Knitting as part of Junior Activities of the New Orleans Chapter of American Red Cross in September of 1918. (Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

I have some bad news: The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to linger for decades.

One mechanism is through education. As my series on educational disruptions has shown, children who miss school time suffer academic losses in the short run, and those effects are noticeable decades later in the form of worse economic outcomes and other quality-of-life metrics. In the case of a series of teacher strikes in Argentina, researchers even found that the harmful effects passed down from one generation to the next.

But babies born during the pandemic may also suffer. At least, that’s what happened in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic, according to a widely cited 2006 paper by Columbia University’s Douglas Almond. Almond looked at the cohort of babies born in the wake of the flu outbreak that hit most severely in late 1918 and early 1919, then followed their life trajectories through 1980. Compared with children born just before or after, children exposed to the flu pandemic were less likely to finish high school, earned less money and were more likely to depend on welfare assistance. The harmful effects were twice as large for nonwhite children.

May 1919 — Students in their “back yard workshop” in Denver, Colorado, while school was closed during the Spanish flu. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group / Getty Images)

The graph below, from Almond’s paper, shows this clearly. During a period when educational attainment levels were rising markedly, children born in 1919 represent a clear outlier.

In addition to suffering educational and economic outcomes, children born in the wake of the 1918 pandemic were more likely to have served time in jail or to report a work-limiting disability 60 years later. By 1980, adults born in 1919 had received 8 percent to 12 percent more in welfare payments than their peers who were born a year earlier or later.

To be clear, Almond did not have data on a direct link between the influenza virus and its effect on children. The data necessary to make that point simply weren’t collected back then. It’s quite possible that Almond was actually observing economic effects, not anything tied to a mother’s health or viral strains that she may or may not have passed on to her children.

September 1918 — Junior Red Cross, Gulf Division, from Wright High School in New Orleans. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group / Getty Images)

Thankfully, babies and young children have been spared the worst health effects from COVID-19. About 2 percent of infants born to mothers who test positive near the delivery date have also tested positive within the first four days after birth. Recent studies from New York City and San Francisco have found that babies born to mothers infected with the virus were no more likely to suffer adverse outcomes in terms of birth weight, difficulty breathing or respiratory infections than babies whose mothers were not exposed.

But those studies may be incomplete. While Almond’s research does not show evidence of a direct health link, the indirect economic effects he found are still worrying. For example, a Dutch study found that children born during recessions live fewer years than individuals born during economic booms. Similarly, a study on recessions in the U.S. found that young children and babies who live in the counties hit hardest by a recession face lower odds of graduating from college, earn less money and are more likely to live in poverty as adults.

The 1918 pandemic itself led to a sharp, albeit brief, economic shock that slowed manufacturing and industrial output. Partly because the country was in the midst of fighting World War I during the worst months of the pandemic, the economy rebounded quickly. In contrast, economists aren’t expecting a full economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic for at least a few more years.

We may need to wait a few years to see whether the economic effects of COVID-19 start to materialize. For example, a study that came out last year found that babies born in California during the depths of the 2007-09 recession had lower birth weights and a higher likelihood of pre-term birth compared with babies born before or after the recession. Again, socially and economically disadvantaged groups suffered the largest effects.

These are ominous findings suggesting that hidden economic factors may influence a child’s life in ways that aren’t obvious in the moment. But hopefully, they give policymakers more reasons to speed economic recovery efforts and make sure they deliver benefits to families and children who are going to need them the most.

Chad Aldeman is policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

Many districts are struggling financially. They have spent large sums of money dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic — buying technology, purchasing cleaning supplies, hiring more substitute teachers and attempting to address student learning loss and disengagement. This story, of districts in distress, is an easy one to tell, and there are certainly many districts in this situation.

But that narrative does not describe all districts. Those that have remained mostly or entirely virtual have actually been able to save money, and some are even on pace to run surpluses this year.

Edunomics Lab

To get a clearer picture of school district spending patterns during the last several months, our team at the Edunomics Lab dug into a sample of large-district financial documents. In a webinar this month, we compared the approved district budgets from last summer to mid-year financial documents this winter to give us a portrait of whether districts are spending more or less than projected. We specifically included districts that were conducting in-person classes and others that have remained fully remote for the past year. The contrast is stark.

On one end, districts that have been operating in person tend to be running deficits. For example, Gwinnett and Fulton counties in Georgia are overspending their budgets by $282 and $206 per pupil, respectively. The Des Moines school district was over budget by $248 per student. The Minneapolis district started reopening in February and is already over budget by $1,055 per pupil, mainly due to an increase in student support services. The Austin, Texas, district was over its budget by a whopping $1,791 per student.

Meanwhile, districts that are operating remotely are spending less than anticipated — on substitute teachers, utilities, supplies and transportation— and might be less likely to replace staff who have left.

This may not fit the national narrative, but many districts fall into this camp. Rochester, Minnesota, for example, started opening elementary schools this month after running $9.7 million under budget through the middle of the year, the equivalent of saving $540 per pupil. Portland, Oregon, had $13 million less in revenue than forecast, but expenditures fell by $34 million, for a net saving of $419 per student. Seattle had spent $394 less per student, and Montgomery County, Maryland, saved $180 per student.

Nearly all the large California school districts spent less than they anticipated. San Francisco, San Diego and Long Beach were all under budget through the middle of the year. Los Angeles Unified had the largest savings we found; it underspent its budget by $532 million, a saving of $1,074 per student. About half of that came in the form of reduced payroll.

Ironically, districts facing budget deficits right now may be ahead of the ones with surpluses. Districts that have been open since the fall can already start implementing policies to address any learning gaps that emerged from last spring’s shutdowns. Meanwhile, districts that remained closed throughout the fall and winter are still in the middle of contentious reopening fights. As those fights continue, every day of lost instruction means another day lost for students, and, in those districts that remain closed, students may continue falling further behind.

Some districts may be unable to open without external pressure. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, for example, believes schools there would not have been able to open without mayoral control, and city leaders in Los Angeles and San Francisco are resorting to lawsuits to pressure school districts to open the schools. Money could also play a role. State lawmakers, even in Democratic-led states, are pushing schools to reopen and tying funding to those decisions.

It’s unclear what will happen next. State budgets are far more robust than projections from last summer led us to believe. While we can’t say whether school districts have all the money they will eventually need to help students recover lost learning time, we can say their budgets are in better shape than we might have expected six months or a year ago.

Chad Aldeman is policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

In California and 14 other states, plus the District of Columbia, public school teachers do not participate in Social Security. They won’t find any deductions for Social Security taxes on their pay stubs. Unlike teachers in other states who get both Social Security and a retirement plan, they are dependent solely on their state pension.

Credit: Bellwether Education Partners

Avoiding taxes may seem like a good deal in the short term, but there are long-term risks, as nonparticipating teachers won’t get any Social Security benefits for their years of service. In effect, they are trading the safety and portability of the progressive Social Security benefit formula for the chance at a big payout from their state pension plan.

For certain types of workers, this might be a good trade. Under the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), new teachers who start this year will eventually qualify for a pension equal to 2 percent times their years of service times the average of their highest three years of salary.

Critically, however, the salary used in the CalSTRS pension formula is not adjusted for inflation. That may not matter much for someone who’s already close to collecting benefits, but it matters a great deal for someone who’s far from retirement age. Every year a teacher has to wait to collect the pension is a year inflation takes a tiny bite.

The CalSTRS formula, like other teacher pension plans, provides benefits in a linear fashion. Workers who earn higher salaries while they work receive proportionately higher pensions when they’re retired.

Social Security works differently, in three key ways. First, and most obviously, Social Security is a national program. State pension plans do offer some features to allow for worker mobility, but those features have limits. Economists Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky have found that teachers who move across state lines earn pensions worth 50 to 75 percent less than someone who stayed put.

Second, Social Security benefits are based on a worker’s highest 35 years of earnings, and all years are automatically adjusted for inflation. That protects people who may enter and exit the workforce at different points in their career, whether to take care of family or for other reasons.

But most importantly, Social Security is progressive. It was designed to provide disproportionately large benefits to lower-income workers. This stands in stark contrast to teacher pension plans like CalSTRS.

As I show in a new report for TeacherPensions.org, these three differences make a huge impact on workers. To illustrate what this looks like in real life, consider the case of a new teacher hired this year in California. She’s 25 years old. She makes $40,000. After 10 years of employment, she might be eligible for a monthly CalSTRS benefit worth about $730 when she retires. However, she’ll have to wait 27 more years to collect. In the meantime, the cost of groceries and health care and everything else will rise, while her pension benefit will not. By the time she’s eligible to retire, her pension will cover only about half of the value of what it would be worth today.

Now, imagine she had been participating in Social Security. Using the same assumptions, she would be eligible for a monthly benefit when she retires worth $890 in today’s dollars. But because Social Security benefits are adjusted for inflation, that amount will rise over time to cover changes in the cost of living.

As I show in my paper, this same teacher would need to teach for 24 consecutive years in California before she qualified for a CalSTRS pension benefit that equaled or exceeded the value of what she would have received under Social Security. This is the gamble California teachers — and educators in all the other non-Social Security states — are making. Pension plans like CalSTRS provide a much more generous benefit to those who remain teaching in one state for their entire career, but Social Security provides a better base level of benefits for everybody.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the early 1990s, Congress directed the Internal Revenue Service to write a rule that would protect all state and local government employees who lack Social Security benefits. But, as my paper shows, that provision is not functioning as intended. Worse, the rule offers better protection for the highest-paid, longest-serving workers while leaving the most vulnerable employees short.

This situation is not trivial. In addition to 1.2 million active teachers who aren’t covered by Social Security, there are about 20 million retirees who performed some service to a state or local government without Social Security coverage. Many of those workers now face a lower standard of living in retirement due to the flaws in these seemingly arcane rules.

Workers may not even be aware of this problem, but Congress must act to fix it. After all, states on their own will never match the national portability provided by Social Security, and they have chosen not to match the progressive, inflation-adjusted benefits Social Security offers.

Chad Aldeman is a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners and the editor of TeacherPensions.org. Bellwether was co-founded by Andy Rotherham, who sits on The 74’s board of directors.

The root of this disconnect started a century ago, when Andrew Carnegie created the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America to provide guaranteed retirement income and life insurance, mainly to college professors who were at risk of changing employers without much in the way of retirement savings. Carnegie saw worker mobility as a given, and perhaps even a good thing, and wanted to design a retirement system that worked in concert with workers’ lives.

In contrast, states created their K-12 pension plans for a different type of employee who would stay at one job for his or her entire working life. At the time, many states forbade teachers from marrying or having children, and the only ones who remained in the profession had no other dependable sources of income. This was well before Social Security was extended to public servants, and states operated all-or-nothing retirement plans that awarded pensions to employees with 25 or more years of service.

In creating these plans, states could know exactly how many teachers they had at various years of service, and they could project how many people would become eligible for benefits. In this model, state retirement plans excluded transitory workers under the now-outdated assumption that workers who left the profession early could depend on other sources of income.

States have attempted to improve their plans over time, and 35 now enroll their K-12 teachers in Social Security, but pension plans still struggle to offer adequate benefits to workers who don’t remain in one school system for their full careers.

The graph below shows the bifurcation between these two very different approaches. In 33 states, higher education employees have a choice of retirement plans. In contrast, just six states offer their K-12 teachers a choice. In higher education, 15 states automatically enroll employees in a portable retirement plan such as a 401(k), a cash balance plan or a defined benefit plan with employer match. Just five states enroll their K-12 employees in any type of portable plan. All told, public higher education employees in 48 states are either automatically enrolled in a portable plan or have a choice to do so; just 11 states make the same options available to K-12 employees.

Author’s analysis of data from NASRA and NCTQ

But not only are the retirement plans offered to higher education employees more portable; in most cases, they are also more generous to workers.

The table below compares the portable retirement plan offered to employees at the University of California with what the California State Teachers Retirement System offers the state’s K-12 employees (both plans cover everyone on the payroll, including librarians, janitors, bus drivers and secretaries as well as faculty members.)

As the table shows, employees at California’s flagship universities have a better retirement plan on nearly all fronts. They have a shorter vesting period, meaning they qualify for employer-provided retirement benefits earlier. They get a larger contribution toward their retirement from their employer. And University of California employees are covered by Social Security, whereas the state’s K-12 teachers are not.

In addition to being generous, the university plan is cost-effective — unlike the K-12 CalSTRS plan, which has about $97 billion in unfunded liabilities. Between school districts and the state itself, the “employer” share of pension costs total 28.2 percent of each teacher’s salary that must be put into CalSTRS, but only about one-quarter of that goes toward benefits. The rest, 20.6 percent of salary, goes to pay down those unfunded liabilities. In contrast, the University of California plan has no unfunded liabilities, and it never will, because it explicitly ties a worker’s benefit to the contributions made into the plan on his or her behalf.

One final element is fairness. The University of California plan treats all workers the same: No matter how early they retire, university employees can depend on getting the same contribution rate as their colleagues.

In contrast, the CalSTRS pension plan has two benefit tiers based on the employee’s start date, and neither of them distributes benefits evenly. The pension formula awards disproportionately large benefits to teachers who stay for 25 or 30 years, while giving else substantially less.

Taking all these factors together, it’s clear that participants in the University of California plan receive much more generous retirement benefits than K-12 employees in the same state. California is but one example, but it illustrates why all states should give their K-12 employees the same retirement plan choices as they offer to their higher education employees.

Chad Aldeman is a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners and the editor of TeacherPensions.org. Bellwether was co-founded by Andy Rotherham, who sits on The 74’s board of directors.

There is a better way forward, but first we need to back up with some history. The Los Angeles Unified School District began offering health benefits to its employees starting in the 1940s, and it added coverage for qualifying retirees and their spouses beginning in 1966. Soon after, the district eliminated employee contributions toward those benefits, leaving LAUSD on the hook for any future rise in health care costs.

Rather than renegotiate that promise as health care costs skyrocketed, the district has decided to trim costs only by narrowing its definition of a qualifying retiree. In the 1970s, any retiree with five years of service qualified, but now there are six more tiers of membership, depending on when the employee began working for the district. Employees hired as of 2009 qualify only if the sum of their age and years of service equals 85 or more, plus they must serve at least 25 consecutive years immediately prior to retirement.

These decisions have done nothing to reduce the underlying cost of the benefits, and they have effectively prioritized comparatively well-off retirees with stable work histories over more transient workers who might need the benefits more. In the meantime, the district has saved only $145 million for promises that are valued at $13.6 billion, and without further changes, current and future teachers will bear the burden of making up that difference.

These trends are unavoidable, unless district leaders start thinking more creatively.

This is where the federal Affordable Care Act comes in. Obamacare provides subsidies on a sliding scale to individuals to purchase health insurance, regardless of age; in 2018, a two-member household earning less than $65,840, or 400 percent of the federal poverty level, would qualify for assistance. If we assume that retirees have no income sources other than their pension (teachers in California do not have Social Security), publicly available data suggest that 87 percent of LAUSD retirees could qualify for Obamacare subsidies.

Even if we assume that many retirees are in dual-income households, more than half would be eligible for federal supports. Another way of saying this is that the district’s retiree health benefits are largely redundant for at least half and up to five-sixths of all current recipients.

To be sure, the Obamacare subsidies and a “basic” health plan are not as generous as what the district currently provides, but that brings up a question of priorities: Should the district continue to bankrupt itself to provide Cadillac benefits to a smaller and smaller group of workers, or should it focus its investments on the workers and retirees who need it the most?

That question leads us into how the district’s current benefits are regressive, which is a little more complex. Still, it’s worth unpacking who exactly would lose out if LAUSD switched all future employees to the Obamacare exchanges. Remember, as of 2009, the only new workers who will qualify for benefits will be people who work for the district for at least 25 consecutive years immediately prior to retirement. That means they can’t be short-term workers; they can’t take a year off, say, to care for family, and they can’t work for the district for the first part of their career and then pursue something else. And again, we’re talking about households earning $66,000 a year even as they’re technically considered retired by the district. Across all Los Angeles households, 72 percent earn less than that, and most have to work for that income.

Of course, the district could also pursue a middle ground by recasting its benefits to work with Obamacare subsidies instead of providing a standalone benefit. There is precedent for this. When the district created its retiree health benefits in the 1960s, Medicare existed but wasn’t available to state and local government employees like L.A. teachers. In the 1980s, Congress extended coverage to state and local government workers, and the district began requiring retirees over age 65 to apply for Medicare coverage. Today, the district still offers some benefits to retirees over age 65, but Medicare covers the basic costs and the district’s benefits are more of a perk than a standalone offering.

The district should now do the same thing with Obamacare. Its leaders can no longer ignore the benefits of a federal, means-tested program that would be cheaper and more equitable than what it’s currently providing.

Chad Aldeman is a principal at Bellwether Education Partners and the editor of TeacherPensions.org.